Halfway Point
by HalfASlug
Summary: Martha Jones, halfway through the year that never was.


_Disclaimer: I'm still not the Beeb but I did spend 5 minutes as ITV once._

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It's three days after Japan that Martha hears the question next.

Over the past six months she has come to recognise this question as the gateway into The Speech. If she stands on a street corner or goes door to door then she would blend in with the other preachers and soothsayers that have sprung up and be lost in the tide. By letting the people come to her, they are willing to listen. Joining the rebels, setting up medical stations and standing, unarmed, between the innocent and danger gets their attention.

Even in a post-apocalyptic hell hole it seems humanity needs celebrity.

There are the questions about what she had done to save that village in Belgium, how she contained that virus in India and a thousand others in between, but the same two questions always crop up in the end.

Three days after Japan, she is on a boat heading to Malaysia. Surrounding her is a small group from Thailand made up of mainly women and children. She doesn't wonder where the men are. Experience gives her enough to do the guess work. They all look like they haven't bathed in weeks and most have untreated injuries, but the looks they give Martha say that she probably looks worse.

A woman with a black eye and a sleeping baby asks if she is Martha Jones and she nods. There's a flicker of shock followed by an inquiry into the rumours about Japan.

"It's over," Martha replies. "Gone. Everyone and everything."

There's a silence that Martha doesn't hear over the sounds of explosions and screams and Professor Akasaki telling her to go, get out, take the boat and just _go._

His name joins the list she now recites every night before she sleeps. The list of names of people who helped her, who she would be dead without, who history should remember and celebrate but will be forgotten by everyone but her.

It's then that a small boys asks the question.

"But - why? Why are you doing this?"

And, for the first time in six months, she hesitates.

The truth is she doesn't know anymore. The truth is she is exhausted down to her very bones and wants to stop. The truth is-

"I can stop the Master."

The child's eyes light up like so many before him, a sight that usually sends Martha soaring, but now only makes the aches worse.

"Really?"

"Yes."

And now for The Speech. Ladies and Gentlemen, if you would like to take your seats.

"You see, there's this man..."

Her jaw is moving, she can feel it, the way it cracks and how that cut on her tongue is still rubbing against her molars as she speaks, but Martha isn't aware of what she is saying anymore. The first time, still in England, she had thrown herself into it. Just like he had said, people in need want a hero and love a story so give them both. She'd helped evacuate a burning block of flats and soon enough people were asking who she was and the words were pouring out of her. Months of travelling had provided the inspiration and the hope that, wherever he was, the man she spoke of was proud kept her going.

Now the words are hollow and she is dragging them up from the place deep inside of her that she tries to keep sane.

"And he knows the Master's secrets, but he's trapped. So he told me them."

Now they taste like ash in her mouth and it reminds her too much of France, of Denmark, of her own flat.

"This man, he has saved you, saved you all, more times than you could possibly know-"

He had help for a lot of it. Of course, that isn't important to The Speech. To The Mission. To anyone.

"-and he has never asked to be thanked."

In fact, he never asks for anything. It's usually provided for him, by some gawping human trying to impress him. Martha remembers being that person. She remembers how every smile sent her way felt like a victory, like a gold star, and how it all meant so much for some reason. She remembers how he didn't ask her to get a job in the Sixties but expected money, food and shelter to come from somewhere. And how he had no concept of her needing sleep before a shift or how she couldn't just not show up because he got bored in the day and how he couldn't just spend a week's wages on biscuits and not expect her to throw things at him.

Back then he had saved the last one in every pack for her. Back then she had thought that meant something.

"He just does these things, these crazy, impossible things to help people."

Like walking across minefields to meet a contact who had been killed the day before she arrived.

"To stand up for what he believes in."

Like that skinhead who had spat in her face as she tried to save his leg.

"And no one even knows his name."

Like she doesn't know her own brother's, not since she told him to get his family out of the country, change their identities and deny all knowledge of her.

"His name is the Doctor."

The reminder that his own name is the trigger for his great plan snaps the restraint Martha has left. She's able to keep to the script as her mind reels in the background. None of this is fair. She's pushing herself past every limit she has ever known, trying to save the world, because this time he can't, and she has to do it while telling everyone how amazing he is. He's sat up there with his old friend while she watches the world burn and tear itself apart, as her friends die around her on a daily basis.

Her soul is an open wound and, even from thousands of miles away, he is rubbing in the salt.

At the beginning she was doing this for him, to save him, to save her family, but she isn't anymore. She does this for herself. Because nothing else feels real and is constant enough for her to believe in it. Every single word of The Speech is a lie. It's her who is going to save them all. It's her who is going to face the Master and, oh, how she is going to laugh as she tells him how his precious empire is collapsing underneath him.

Until then, the walls are closing in on her from all sides and she is breaking, trying to keep it together, to put on foot in front of the other, to just _keep going_. She tells herself that this is just one last trip, one last trip and then home, and the irony was lost long ago.

Because the excuses she made for him fizzle away into nothing and every dark thought she's had takes their place. The waves outside, the creak of the boat, the shuffling of the people around her, it's all being drowned out by the white noise in her ears. It's made of every sneer, every monkey noise, every wolf whistle, every single person who has told her she is mad to even try. Every time he ignored her, every time he over-looked her, every time he took her for granted. Every Nurse Redfern, every perfect bloody Rose and even JK Rowling for being the ones he praised and cared for when she was the one who left everything for him, who kept him from falling apart and put up with his melancholy and got nothing but pain in return.

"I love him."

She hates him.

Not really, not deep down, but right now, three days after Japan on this tiny boat filled with broken people en route to another fallen country, she does.

She finishes The Speech and sees that everyone looks inspired and she doesn't know whether to be happy or sick, but the world needs a hero and she's the plinth on which he is to be built.

"Yeah," the little boy says and she knows the second question coming, "but who are you?"

Martha takes a deep breath and tells him the one bit of truth she has left, but she's working on that.

"That doesn't matter."

She's working on that.

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_Thanks for reading!_


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